Hollywood's Responsibility for Smoking Deaths

CLEVELAND — I've written 14 movies. My characters smoke in many of them, and they look cool and glamorous doing it. Smoking was an integral part of many of my screenplays because I was a militant smoker. It was part of a bad-boy image I'd cultivated for a long time — smoking, drinking, partying, rock 'n' roll.

Smoking, I once believed, was every person's right. Efforts to stop it were politically correct, a Big Brother assault on personal freedoms. Secondhand smoke was a nonexistent problem invented by professional do-gooders. I put all these views into my scripts.

In one of my movies, "Basic Instinct," smoking is part of a sexual subtext. Sharon Stone's character smokes; Michael Douglas's is trying to quit. She seduces him with literal and figurative smoke that she blows into his face. In the movie's most famous and controversial scene, she even has a cigarette in her hand.

I'm sure the tobacco companies loved "Basic Instinct." One of them even launched a brand of "Basic" cigarettes not long after the movie became a worldwide hit, perhaps inspired by my cigarette-friendly work. My movie made a lot of money; so did their new cigarette.

Remembering all this, I find it hard to forgive myself. I have been an accomplice to the murders of untold numbers of human beings. I am admitting this only because I have made a deal with God. Spare me, I said, and I will try to stop others from committing the same crimes I did.

Eighteen months ago I was diagnosed with throat cancer, the result of a lifetime of smoking. I am alive but maimed. Much of my larynx is gone. I have some difficulty speaking; others have some difficulty understanding me. I no longer have the excruciating difficulty swallowing or breathing that I experienced in the first months after my surgery.

I haven't smoked or drank for 18 months now, though I still take it day-to-day and pray for help. I believe in prayer and exercise. I have walked five miles a day for a year, without missing even one day. Quitting smoking and drinking has taught me the hardest lesson I've ever learned about my own weakness; it has also given me the greatest affection and empathy for those still addicted.

I have spent some time in the past year and a half in cancer wards. I have seen people gasp for air as a suctioning device cleaned their tracheas. I have heard myself wheezing horribly, unable to catch my breath, as a nurse begged me to breathe. I have seen an 18-year-old with throat cancer who had never smoked a single cigarette in his life. (His mother was a chain smoker.) I have tried not to cry as my wife fitted the trachea tube that I had coughed out back into my throat. (Thankfully, I no longer need it.)

I don't think smoking is every person's right anymore. I think smoking should be as illegal as heroin. I'm no longer such a bad boy. I go to church on Sunday. I'm desperate to see my four boys grow up. I want to do everything I can to undo the damage I have done with my own big-screen words and images.

So I say to my colleagues in Hollywood: what we are doing by showing larger-than-life movie stars smoking onscreen is glamorizing smoking. What we are doing by glamorizing smoking is unconscionable.

Hollywood films have long championed civil rights and gay rights and commonly call for an end to racism and intolerance. Hollywood films espouse a belief in goodness and redemption. Yet we are the advertising agency and sales force for an industry that kills nearly 10,000 people daily.

A cigarette in the hands of a Hollywood star onscreen is a gun aimed at a 12- or 14-year-old. (I was 12 when I started to smoke, a geeky immigrant kid who wanted so very much to be cool.) The gun will go off when that kid is an adult. We in Hollywood know the gun will go off, yet we hide behind a smoke screen of phrases like "creative freedom" and "artistic expression." Those lofty words are lies designed, at best, to obscure laziness. I know. I have told those lies. The truth is that there are 1,000 better and more original ways to reveal a character's personality.

Screenwriters know, too, that some movie stars are more likely to play a part if they can smoke — because they are so addicted to smoking that they have difficulty stopping even during the shooting of a scene. The screenwriter writing smoking scenes for the smoking star is part of a vicious and deadly circle.

My hands are bloody; so are Hollywood's. My cancer has caused me to attempt to cleanse mine. I don't wish my fate upon anyone in Hollywood, but I beg that Hollywood stop imposing it upon millions of others.

I also hope and pray this gentleman is able to beat this cancer he is fighting. I will pray for him the same as I will pray for our dear Charleton Heston. Unlike some of those who are clearly being nasty on some of the sites mentioned before. I am like the person who said they don't have to fall into a pile of feces to know what it would be like so I don't go there. But...we will indeed pray for this man along with Charleton Heston. May they both live long and happy lives.

Here in lies part of the problem its none of your damn buisness who smokes and who dont [every person's right ]is just that every person's right not yours to say whether we can or not period ....Just be concerned for your own family and leave everyone else alone.

I want to do everything I can to undo the damage I have done with my own big-screen words and images

Try not making it so obvious that your crying out to be a victim

Let me state from the beginning that I detest parasite lawyers and mega-dollar lawsuits based on victimology and stupidity. BUT, if I thought I could make Jane Fonda, Julia Roberts, or Babs(please, someone tell me she smoked in at least one movie) open her checkbook and pay to settle the harm she has done...BUWAHAHAHA, just the thought of it...Muwahahahahaha. oh yeah, I think I could do it!

He's is not to blame for smoking deaths anymore than tobacco companies are responsible for his cancer.

Instead of him falsely accusing tobacco companies of "murder" b/c they allow people to spend their hard-earned money on a product that is a well-known killer, why doesn't he admit that he made a bad choice to take a needless risk.

Libs would never think of blaming themselves for their own bad choices.

I think smoking should be as illegal as heroin.

I love it when the liberal Clark Kent's go into the phone booth of a traumatic experience and out comes....

SuperNazi!

Let us all imagine a world where cigarettes are illegal.

Sit back, relax, imagine it.

Urban gangs fight over "tobacco turf".

Public officials offer protection to the gangs in exchange for suitcases of cash.

Politicians have a press conference promising they will never legalize the dangerous drug tobacco while their trusted aides carry their suitcases to Switzerland.

Head of the tobacco cartel Jose Nefarios declares "I am more powerful than the Yankee President" as he shows off his arsenal of nuclear weapons. He explains that while he has less nukes than his neighbor to the north _he_ is not afraid to use them.

Ah, what a wonderful world. I can hardly wait. :-(

Libs would never think of blaming themselves for their own bad choices.

Thanks to the lawsuits against big tobacco, we now have all the little VICTIMS crawling out of the woodwork, a man is in the process of suing the government for making him gamble, now lets see how the shoe fits on the other foot..... a little irony goes a long way.

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